Joe Haldeman - Camouflage

“And have a good memory for faces.”

Especially yours, the changeling thought.

“Hot dog?” Russell said.

“No, I’m headed for the hotel. I saw you here and wondered whether we might get together a little earlier tomorrow morning, before the … thing.”

“Like what, eight o’clock?”

“Eight would be fine. I’ll leave a message for Jan.” He nodded at the changeling. “Miss Valida. See you then, Russell.”

When he was out of earshot, the changeling said, “He always dresses like that?” White linen suit, Panama hat, Samoan shirt.

“Yeah, when he’s not working in the lab. Maybe a century out of date.”

“A few other rich old guys who come into the bank dress that way. My boss calls them his Somerset Maugham characters. Was he some actor?”

“Writer, I think.” He ate the last bite and stood up. “Ready for another?”

“Let it get a little burnt. Try a beer, though.”

“Excellent idea.” He took two Heinekens out and popped them.

She drank off her wine and accepted one. “Here’s to drunken debauchery on Sunday.” They clinked bottles together. “So … showing Newton a hologram.”

“Well, it’s occurred to me that this thing might not be from another planet. It might be from our own future.”

“Really? I thought you could only go the other way.”

“You know about that?”

“I saw a thing on the cube. Particle accelerator.”

“Yeah, they’ve been able to move a particle a fraction of a second into the future. Which is kosher; general relativity has always allowed that.”

“But not into the past?”

“That’s right—and it’s not just relativity; it’s causality, common sense. Cause and effect out the window.”

“But you think—”

“I know it’s like ‘one impossible thing happens, therefore anything impossible can happen.’ But it makes a screwy kind of sense. They sent this indestructible thing back a million years into the past, and put it where no one could find it. Then they went to dig it up…”

“And it wasn’t there!” She nodded rapidly. “So they sent this kind of robot back here to find out what happened.”

“Not a robot,” he said. “Definitely not a robot.”

“You knew her?”

He hesitated. “Pretty well. Or I thought I did. She was pretty human for a robot. Or transhuman, as I say, from the future.”

“Evolved from humans?”

“Bingo. It wouldn’t take millions of years, either. It’s only law and custom, not science, that keeps us from directing our own evolution now.”

The changeling considered this. It seemed to have memories going so far back that it always considered itself a visitor from the distant past. It could have been from the future, though, and lost the memory of that travel.

It knew that a way around the causality paradox might be that the time traveler not be allowed to take any information back in time. It had never thought of applying that to its own amnesia of the time before the centuries it had spent as a great white shark. It could have been sent back as a blank-slate creature that needed no memory to survive, and evolve.

“Have you talked this over with Jack?”

“Jack? No. He’s all for aliens from another planet. Especially since the thing with Rae, our ‘space alien.’ ”

“Which you don’t buy.”

“Well … I guess you can make a better scientific, or at least logical, case for extraterrestrial origin. But if so, why didn’t she just come forward and say ‘Take me to your leader’?”

“Maybe she was afraid.”

“She wasn’t afraid of me.”

“Maybe Jack.” The changeling smiled. “I take it she wouldn’t be the only one.”

“He’s a little scary sometimes.” He got up and turned the hot dogs. “Let’s burn the other side.”

She didn’t say anything while he repositioned the meat and buns. When he looked up she was staring out to sea, an odd thoughtful expression on her face.

“Sharon?”

It was a song. A song.

The changeling never stopped manipulating the ones and zeros. Pretending to be human only used a small part of its intelligence, so while it was carrying on bank business or being social, even concentrating on Russ, most of its being was swimming through the binary sea of the message.

The message itself wasn’t clear, but suddenly the changeling knew what it was.

A song in its native tongue. A language forgotten for a million years.

“Sharon? Are you all right?”

“Oh! Sorry.” She rubbed her face with both hands. “Sometimes I do that.”

He sat on the bench, not too close, and touched her hand. “Is it your parents?” She nodded her head in two short jerks. “I lost mine together, too, at least in the same week. I was quite a bit older than you, but it still hit me hard. Being alone.”

Her eyes brimmed and she wiped them. “You’re right. Alone.” He’s a wonderful man, it thought, but he doesn’t know what loneliness is.

He wanted to take her into his arms, but restrained himself. “Let me take you home.”

“No. It’s passed.” She flashed him a bright smile. “Let’s have another hot dog.” She peered into the empty beer bottle. “Maybe the beer makes me sentimental. I should have another.”

“Your wish is my command.” He opened two and passed her one. “Sentimental together.”

A song. A song about home. “Are they burnt enough?”

He touched one lightly. “Done to a turn.”

While they ate and chatted about deliberately inconsequential things, it made plans for the rest of the day and night. Especially night. Russell was in for a little surprise.

Tomorrow, they were almost certainly going to announce that the artifact had answered them, and perhaps release the binary sequence, so that a few million other people could try to figure it out.

People wouldn’t. It would be like someone who didn’t know what Braille was running a finger along a line of it, in a foreign language. A coded message, not coded for secrecy, but nevertheless unbreakable.

But by Tuesday, there would be outsiders all over the place. Reporters lucky enough to be in American Samoa would be on the spot by noon Monday. The Tuesday morning plane would be crowded with them, from America; Thursday, from Asia and Europe. Security would be tighter around the clock.

So it had until tomorrow morning.

“I don’t want to rush things,” Russell said, “but are you doing anything tonight? If I don’t have an excuse, Jack’s going to collar me at Aggie’s.”

She closed her eyes. Careful. “I wish I could. But I’m going out with a man from work.” She patted Russell’s knee. “Have to tell him I’m not interested. Free Monday and Tuesday, though.”

“We already have lunch Monday,” he reminded her.

“Dinner Tuesday, then.”

“I’ll make Sails reservations at eight, right away. There’ll be a lot of hungry reporters in town.”

The changeling nodded. “And I’ll know the big secret by then.”

“By ten tomorrow, if you listen to the news. Or you can wait and let me surprise you at lunch.”

“Maybe I’ll wait. I don’t suppose you’ll let me try to guess.”

“Nope.”

“You’ve discovered the president’s an alien.”

“Damn, you got it. Now we’ll have to kill you.”

“Oh, well. At least I found out early.”

They pedaled around Apia after lunch, stopping at the Maketi Fou, the normally crowded central market, for iced coconuts. On Sunday it was pretty lazy, the vendors chatting in clusters in shady spots, reluctantly coming over to take their money. He bought her a mother-of-pearl necklace she admired. She bought him a garish silk crimson lavalava and dared him to wear it to dinner.